The Manhattan Project and Sharia Law: Digital Voices 24/11/2012

T’is the season to be trolly – we’ve had some cracking comments ‘neath the line this week and we’ve rounded up the brightest, boldest and most cage rattling of them here for your amusement.

While chatter from some of our older stories continues to raise eyebrows we’ve had some good stuff from more recent reports. Here’s some of the most insightful and provocative comments that have hit our newsdesks this week – here is Digital Voices for 24/11/2012.

This story has turned into something of a dragnet for comments by humourless windbags who think we’ve violated the basic principles of journalism because they didn’t get the joke in the headline. So it was really pleasing to hear from Reality_Cheque123 who not only gave us a quick chemistry lesson but told us about the Calutrons used in the Manhattan Project.

A Calutron, for those not familiar with the Manhattan Project, is a device used in the uranium enrichment process.

After having explained that silver was a better conductor than copper or gold, Reality-Cheque123 told us how “silver was literally ‘borrowed’ from the US Treasury to enable the construction of the Calutron machines. Post-war, the silver was re-melted back to ingots and returned.”

Not being experts on this particular facet of the Second World War (it most certainly wasn’t on the GCSE History syllabus) we were pleased to learn a little bit more about this, even though it’s not directly relevant to broadband. Thanks for sharing Reality_Cheque123!

We love Sky – Sky+ revolutionised digital TV in the UK and we love being able to remotely set recordings and access the planner from our phones now.

But we totally share the sentiments of ian who raged “when will Sky get the hint that 65% of UK phone users have Android devices ???”

It’s a good question, one which we’ve posed to Sky on more than a few occasions. The official line is that thanks to Android fragmentation it’s been tricky in the past to create apps for a multitude of different devices, all running on various iterations of Android, all with slightly different resolutions and screen dimensions.

One of the key points of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is that, in a nutshell it’s easier for developers to write apps for devices with different display resolutions. The problem is though that while 65 per cent of the UK may own Android phones, at the moment most of them will still be running on old school 2.3 Gingerbread.

We are expecting that Sky will bring its Sky+ app to more Android phones. It’s a bit ridiculous that high-end heroes from this year like the Samsung Galaxy S3, and the HTC One X, One S and One X+ don’t yet have Sky+ support. Like we said, we ask Sky about this quite a lot – stay tuned for an update on this one…

Last week we were mystified to learn that a B2B company with a service called YOUR VIEW was attempting to stop YouView – a consumer brand – using that name. The company in question is Total Ltd, an ISP that specialises in selling data and communications solutions to other businesses.

While we reckon that both the markets and the services are sufficiently different (hey, we’re not legal experts…) we have to tip the hat to one chrisb in the comments.

While we were busy pointing out that YOUR VIEW and YouView are about as similar as HP Sauce and HP computers Chris ingeniously pointed out that Total Ltd is very similar in name to Total UK, the fuel company.

So while the YOUR VIEW product – which was trademarked first – does sound similar to YouView, perhaps Total Ltd ought to take that black kettle off the boil before the pot runneth over.

The killer RABIT story is guaranteed to provide at least one solid gold chuckle every week. A lightning rod for thinly veiled racism, classism and CAPS LOCK RAGE, we’ve heard everything from calls to bring back the rope to mass deportation (even if the criminals caught are UK citizens).

This week we’ve got merefaloa apparently calling for sharia law along with constant surveillance of scrap dealers:

“the scrap is sold through bent outlets,if these were targeted and forced to employ more stringent accounting,mounting of 24 hr surveilance,spot raids,etc, this serious problem could be overcome,also chop the hands,thats pretty effective.”

Amputation for theft is one of the oft-touted tenets of sharia, something which wouldn’t necessarily fly well with some of the commenters here… never mind that constant video surveillance of every single scrap metal dealer in the UK would no doubt cost more money than the total value of all scrap stolen every year.

That said, we’re pretty sure that merefaloa was being sarcastic here…

That’s all for this week – we’ll be serving up another helping of mirth and majesty in the next edition of Digital Voices.

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